Over the past week i have experienced quite a bit of downtime and instability from Steam....none of which has been recorded on steam uptime stats etc. As i write this once again my Steam is down with no explanation. I checked the forums and it seems this is global...

I'm having second thoughts on wanting all games to use Steam if this is the way forward, at least Origin is up, i guess ill go play BF3 for a while...Thankgod EA opted not to use steamworks for that game.....

I would agree to a certain extent but the number of users at time of downtime is nowhere near peak. If it was peaking and then going down that would explain some but since 10pm GMT last night i have experiencing downtime. As well as downtime throughout the holiday period.

You would think that they would be prepared for any extra load at this time of year, no ?

Yeah im able to login to Steam but cannot view friends list nor play any steamworks/cloud games.

I'm logged in yes, chat is down but that's normal. All my steamwork games seem to be working just fine. Chat has never affected my access to my games, I've had it go down in the middle of a L4D game and experienced no issues.

I've been using Steam TONS over the break and haven't had the first issue. More than likely there are some routing issues with regional backbone providers. That might be why Valve hasn't seen any issues to report. Assuming they're not being dicks about it.